We’ve Been Fighting Authoritarianism Since 1954. Are You With Us?

We’ve Been Fighting Authoritarianism Since 1954. Are You With Us?

Dissent was founded in a moment that must have felt as bleak as today, with two principal aims: to “defend democratic, humanist and radical values” and to attack all forms of authoritarianism. For 63 years, we’ve done just that, and we’re not going to stop now.

When Irving Howe and Lewis Coser launched Dissent in 1954, Republicans controlled both the White House and Congress. Senator Joseph McCarthy and Vice President Richard Nixon were waging all-out political war on progressives of all stripes. The Democratic Party was demoralized and divided; many panicked liberal leaders abandoned their commitment to civil liberties and folded to McCarthyism, as did some formerly radical intellectuals. Universities purged faculties of left-wing professors. Socialist groups were in disarray. “Organized radicalism in the United States,” as Maurice Isserman put it in his history of the magazine, “was at a twentieth-century nadir.”

Rereading this history in the weeks after the election, we couldn’t help but compare it to our looming political reality. Howe and Coser founded Dissent in a moment that must have felt as bleak as today, with two principal aims: to “defend democratic, humanist and radical values” and to attack all forms of authoritarianism. For 63 years, Dissent has done just that, and we’re not going to stop now.

Are you with us? If so, please show your support and donate to Dissent.

The Republican Party now controls many of this country’s most powerful institutions. Unabashed white supremacists are taking their seats at the highest levels of government. We should prepare for attacks against unions and the climate, voting rights and the right to protest; women, Muslims, immigrants, people of color, and the poor will suffer the worst of Trump’s time in power.

So how should leftists resist and help defeat this nightmare administration? In the weeks since the election, we have published bold and original political criticism by some of the most thoughtful writers on the left—including Jedediah Purdy, Mae Ngai, Timothy Shenk, and Michelle Chen—suggesting paths forward. But we’re just getting started. It is in moments like these that we most need Dissent’s spirit of radical, non-dogmatic thought. To sustain the magazine as an uncompromising dissident voice, we need your support.

“Dissent would be meaningless if in dissenting it did not also affirm,” Howe and Coser wrote in 1954. Whatever challenges we may face in the coming years, we intend to go on affirming egalitarian ideals and providing a home for the democratic left.

Thank you, as ever, for defending Dissent.

In solidarity,

Kaavya, Natasha, Colin, and Alex
The Staff of Dissent

P.S. If you’d prefer to donate by check, please make it out to Dissent/FSISI and send it to Dissent, 120 Wall Street, Floor 31, New York, NY 10005. Thanks for your support!